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Stage Fright
Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial
Russia
Paul du Quenoy
In June 1920, assessing
the international significance
of the revolutionary
era that had brought
him to power in Russia,
Vladimir Lenin adopted
a theatrical idiom for one
of its most important
events, the Revolution of
1905. “Without the ‘dress
rehearsal’ of 1905,” he
wrote, “the victory of the
October Revolution in
1917 would have been impossible.”
According to Lenin’s statement, political anatomy
borrowed in a teleological sense from the performing arts.
This book explores an inversion of Lenin’s statement. Rather
than question how politics took after the performing arts,
Paul du Quenoy assesses how culture responded to power in
late imperial Russia. Exploring the impact of this period’s
rapid transformation and endemic turmoil on the performing
arts, he examines opera, ballet, concerts, and “serious”
drama while not overlooking newer artistic forms thriving
at the time, such as “popular” theater, operetta, cabaret,
satirical revues, pleasure garden entertainments, and film.
He also analyzes how participants in the Russian Empire’s
cultural life articulated social and political views.
Du Quenoy proposes that performing arts culture in late
imperial Russia—traditionally assumed to be heavily affected
by and responsive to contemporary politics—was
often apathetic and even hostile to involvement in political
struggles. Stage Fright offers a similar refutation of the view
that the late imperial Russian government was a cultural
censor prefiguring Soviet control of the arts. Through a clear
picture of the relationship between culture and power, this
study presents late imperial Russia as a modernizing polity
with a vigorous civil society capable of weathering the profound
changes of the twentieth century rather than lurching
toward an “inevitable” disaster of revolution and civil war.
Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-
Century England
The Subtle Art of Division
Randy Robertson
Censorship profoundly
affected early modern
writing. Censorship and
Conflict in Seventeenth-
Century England offers a
detailed picture of early
modern censorship and
investigates the pressures
that censorship exerted
on seventeenth-century
authors, printers, and
publishers. In the 1600s,
Britain witnessed a civil
war, the judicial execution
of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting
struggle among crown, parliament, and people for
sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.”
This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed
a struggle for the control of language and representation.
Robertson offers a rich study of this “censorship contest”
and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers.
He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy
or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs
from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of
early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing
system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship.
Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this
book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the
designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship,
and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.
Randy Robertson is Assistant Professor of English and
Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.
264 pages | 6.125 x 9.25 | May
isbn 978-0-271-03466-9 | cloth: $75.00s
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03466-9.html
Penn State Studies in the History of the Book Series
History/Literature
Paul du Quenoy is a professor in the Department of History
and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut.
272 pages | 19 illustrations | 6 x 9 | June
isbn 978-0-271-03467-6 | cloth: $65.00s
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03467-6.html
History
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